Black History Month may be over but there’s still plenty to learn and reflect upon, regardless of what month it is. Watershed Voice’s Aundrea Sayrie tells the story of Dick Rowland and one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.
History
The bills package would mandate that K-12 public schools, charters schools, and intermediate school districts incorporate curriculum lessons on Asian American and Pacific Islanders; Latin Americans, Hispanic Americans Caribbean Americans; Indigenous Peoples and Native Americans; and Middle Easterners and Chaldeans starting in the 2022-23 school year.
WSV Columnist Amy East writes, “In researching my own genealogy, I’ve found a number of ancestors who fought for the idea that all men were created equal in the American Revolution, and some that owned slaves. The movement of my ancestors to Cass County was very near to the time the Potawatomi were forcibly removed. Were they involved? I don’t know. Did they benefit? Without a doubt. But just because this knowledge might make me uncomfortable, or challenge how I’d like to see myself, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. When you ask ‘what did you learn that you didn’t know before?’ you don’t get to choose if that knowledge aligns with your worldview. That’s the cost of curiosity, my friend.”
Teachers from Tennessee to Iowa are swept up in a wave of outrage led by GOP politicians nationwide over how schools teach kids about race in U.S. history.
Michigan Advance’s David Hecker writes, “Michigan can and should be a place where every child, regardless of race or ZIP code, has the opportunity to get a quality public education that will set them on a path to success. But we’re not there yet, and it is incumbent on all of us to do the work necessary to strengthen public schools for all students, and specifically to ensure our classrooms are safe, empowering spaces for Black, Indigenous and other students of color.”
Three Rivers Woman’s Club member Helen McCauslin describes the various ways in which the TRWC promoted public health in the 1920s and 1930s, including the creation of a milk fund to ensure children were getting proper nourishment during the Great Depression.
WSV’s Amy East writes, “Two years ago when we bought our place in beautiful Cass County, I dove into the county’s and my own family’s history, discovering that my ties to the area went deeper than I’d known. There is a richness to the county’s intertwined Potawatomi, European, and African American history that I’d never learned in school, or maybe never appreciated.
“Earlier this year, the Cass County Board of Commissioners saw fit to appoint me to the Historical Commission. As part of the publications committee, I’ll be editing and updating books that share our history with anyone who cares to read about it. Will there be an opportunity for more archaeology, maybe here at home? I’d like to think so, I hope so. There are many, many questions to be answered and stories to be told. Give me a couple years and we’ll see what I can do.”
WSV’s Aundrea Sayrie writes about Aviator Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman, the first Black female pilot in U.S. History.
On this day in 1606, in Westminster Hall, eight men stood trial for their participation in the Gunpowder Plot. These men, and a number of other religious extremists, sought to blow up Parliament, kill King James I, Queen Anne, and Prince Charles, and place 9-year-old Princess Elizabeth on the throne in an attempt to gain support and undo laws that all but outlawed Roman Catholicism in the country.
Three Rivers functions in much the same way that it has for years. People still work in specific places that everyone knows about. The town’s citizens shop in stores and visit businesses where they are as likely as not to see someone they know. They take part in social and civic activities and groups, some of which have been around for quite a while. Whether we are aware of it or not, life in Three Rivers centers on its factories, which have changed a lot over time, but which have set many of the same economic and social patterns for generations.
If you live in Three Rivers, you know that certain things in town never stop. The hum of the factories. The streetlights. Cars moving about town. Over and over, every day, they have been present, nonstop, for generations. They are a reminder that the people who live here are up to important things, contributing to the world and keeping life here humming along.
“Studying the past can be a tricky thing. We can quantify data, put events on a timeline, and use any number of tools to see how the world we live in today has unfolded, to see how different events impacted one another, to look for patterns, and to use the lessons therein to make decisions about the future. However, in everyday life, while we may look at past events in passing, we rarely consider them methodically.”